The Rookie Cook

Bernard Clayton’s New Complete Book of Breads
Author: Bernard Clayton
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN-10: 0743287096
ISBN-13: 978-0743287098

I’ve wanted to master bread baking ever since I was a kid. Maybe it’s the chemistry geek in me. Maybe it’s that making bread was somehow exotic to me, since I never saw my mom bake bread. At any rate, when I got married and we got a house with a kitchen that had decent counterspace, I wanted to learn how to bake bread, and after some searching in our local bookstore, I discovered Bernard Clayton.

I couldn’t have picked a better author to teach me how to bake. Clayton may not go into the kind of extra-geeky detail that Shirley Corriher loves in CookWise, but he explains the different kinds of flour, the basic bread baker’s mistakes and how to avoid them, the mistakes you can’t avoid, and other information useful to anyone who’s always wanted to learn how to bake bread.  The chapters cover basic bread types:  white bread, whole-wheat breads, rye breads, etc.  There’s even a recipe for making your own dog biscuits.

If you’re wondering what this has to do with potatoes, Clayton has a chapter on potato breads, including recipes where you can make use of leftover potatoes. See? It fits this week’s theme.

Perhaps most importantly for the rookie cook, Clayton breaks down the different stages of a recipe and gives you a time estimate for each stage.  I’d never seen this in a cookbook before, but it quickly became one of my favorite features.  There’s no guesswork involved when it comes to determining just how long it would take you to make that fancy braided coil festive bread.  Clayton also has a real knack for explaining the techniques used for shaping the dough, which more than makes up for the lack of photographs.  Normally I look for more illustrations in a cookbook, and this one is limited to the occasional line drawing, but I can’t complain about the Complete Book of Breads, thanks to Clayton’s writing.  A rookie cook looking to become a rookie baker is in good hands with Clayton.